Month: January 2020

Home – a four lettered word with a bigger meaning than describable. It means safety, security, a sense of belonging, having someone to turn to, somewhere to go when you need to take shelter. 

So what does home mean to me? That is a difficult question to answer. From a young age the concept of a home was very abstract for me. My mom struggled with substance abuse, and still does to this day. This made the ideology of home a concept that I found difficult to grasp. All of my friends’ home life seemed relatively normal compared to mine, and I never felt like I could relate to them. When I was in grade three my parents ended up getting a divorce, which was very hard for my family. Today, I feel at home when I go home, but I can confidently say I did not always feel like that. I now live at home with my dad, stepmom, and siblings, and being surrounded by family makes me feel loved and supported every single day. But home does not have to mean you are with your family. Home can be with your loved ones too, or even on your own.

2019 was a year of change – I decided to apply for exchange to study abroad in Paris. I asked myself, “is this the best choice for you? Will you feel at home?”. I can confidently say it was the best option, but at the time, it was a difficult decision to make. Thinking of leaving the place I have called home for my entire life to go to a continent I had never been to was an extremely scary thought that I didn’t know was possible. A lot of time and thought goes into a decision to move out to another place, and learn to call a new place home. It takes a lot of courage, but I made the leap. I now consider France a second home, which was not an outcome I expected but am pleasantly surprised by it.

Having somewhere to call home is a privilege, but is often overlooked. Indigenous peoples have suffered from having their land stolen and most do not have a place to call their genuine home. This puts a lot into perspective for me, and makes me strongly believe that most of us take for granted the chances we have been given. 

What I have learned over the years of moving around, living on my own, with my mother, my father, and even living in Europe for 4 months, is that home is where I feel safe. While I may consider this my home, I must remember it is not my land, and the unfortunate truth is that most people may not ever feel safe on their own land.

Works Cited:

The Young Girl’s Story of Evil

I have a great story to tell you.

It is about a young girl from a small village near the woods, and I am sure you have yet to hear about her.

Whether you enjoy this story or not is up to you, but it is a story that I will tell you on how evil came into this young girl’s world. 

Before we continue, let’s give this girl a name. Something simple – not too hard to remember. We can call the young girl Jessica if you’d like. We can even call her Mary. I think we should go with Mary, something easy to remember. If you want we can change it later.

So let the story continue. Mary did not usually traverse near the woods alone, and if she did, there was never a reason to be skeptical. It was Sunday morning, and Mary had grown tiresome of her schedule. Mary made the decision to wander into the woods and try something different – have a different experience than usual. She was not looking for danger, she was simply looking for a change.

As Mary left her village and the people grew seldom as she traversed into the forest, she found the noises became more amplified, and it seemed to just be her. Mary was not scared because she had never been given a reason to be, so she continued down the unknown path in search of a new experience to tell her village when she returned. 

It was when Mary had reached this tree – but not any normal tree, a tree with something seeming like a hole at the bottom of the trunk – that she decided to stop. Mary sat down next to this hole and realized it could possibly lead somewhere. At this newfound knowledge, she began to slightly dig and make the hole deeper. Mary did not know where the hole led, but she knew that it would be the new experience she hoped for.

Mary kept digging and digging, and that is when she felt it – a slight graze on her hand that made her pull back in fear.

Mary was scared, but not too scared. curiosity took over and she decided to inch her hand back in, and that is when she felt the arm grasp her own, and heard soft chanting. The chanting got louder and louder, and she realized that it was a story that was being told. The grip on Mary’s wrist and hand grew stronger and tighter, and her hand began to ache. She yelped in discomfort, but the voice and story did not seize.

Mary was disconnected from reality and was not sure what was going on. She felt this pain for what felt like forever, but it had only been about 5 minutes. The voice stopped, and as Mary stood up, she no longer felt fear. She felt fearless, undefeatable, with a sense of evil inside of her. 

The way she viewed the world was different, and she ran back to the village to tell the rest of the people of her new experience. She told this story to everyone in the village, the story of how evil came into the world. The once calm, peaceful, and happy village had now become full of sorrows, fear, and evil. Once Mary told this story, it could not be taken back.

Commentary

This was a very unique and interesting assignment for me. I am not a storyteller and I have never been tasked with doing something like this, but I really enjoyed this task. I found myself reading a TED talk on how to tell a story. I felt like I was given a lot of freedom and could use my imagination. I did like the fact that we were telling a story about how important stories were, and that we incorporated a world of evil into it. I noticed that each time I tried to recall this story, it continued to change. I then related that directly to the story I was telling, and decided to alter it. I kept reflecting on how King said that it is important to draw your reader’s attention by not giving too much away in the beginning. I definitely learned that it is not an easy task to draw the attention of your audience, and that became very apparent when I was reading my story to my dad. This experience helped me modify the story a bit. The more I told the story, the more comfortable I was, but I also noticed the more it changed. 

I am really happy with this assignment, and it is making me excited for the rest of the term. I can’t wait to read all of your stories and see how they relate in similarity – I think it is very fun that we all based it off of the same chapter and were able to change it completely or only a little, so I am sure many of our stories will be similar.

Thank you!

Maya 🙂

Works Cited:

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.

2003 CBC Massey Lectures, Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas.

Interview with Thomas King (October 2009) by Jordan Wilson. This webpage includes a video file and a transcript of the interview: http://canlit.ca/interviews/21

Crutweets. “A World of Evil and Suffering: Cru.” Cru.org, www.cru.org/us/en/blog/life-and-relationships/hardships/a-world-of-evil-and-suffering.html.

“How to Tell a Great Story.” Harvard Business Review, 12 Aug. 2015, hbr.org/2014/07/how-to-tell-a-great-story.

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my blog. For this blog post, I will be focusing on story and literature and addressing a question that I found to be very interesting in my opinion. I will be writing a summary of three significant points that I found most interesting in the final chapter of If this is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? The final chapter of this book by Chamberlin is chapter eleven, which focuses on ceremonies. First, I will provide you all with a link to the writers cafe website where you can learn more about Chamberlin and this book I am discussing by listening to one of his interviews. I hope you all enjoy this! I listened to it in Unit 1 before making this blog post and I really liked it.

The first most significant point I found interesting was the story about the Gitksan and the destruction of their valley seven thousand years ago. In this story, they discuss the power of storytelling. The Gitksans took the valley for granted many years ago, and it was destroyed by grizzly bears. Chamberlin described their storytelling as having the ritual it required to the court to assert their claims to the land. Their story required belief, which is why they told it with ritual and ceremony. I found this one example to be interesting and understood the power of storytelling and having others believe what you are saying. Without belief, it would have been very difficult for the Gitksan peoples to assert their claim to the land and valley. We can relate this to a lot of the stolen land from Indigenous peoples across Canada as well, and how unfortunate it is that they have to fight for land that was stolen from them – this is an example of why storytelling is so powerful.

A second point I found to be interesting was that each story has two truths. The first truth would be the allegiance to the facts of experience, which are part of us. The second truth is the formalities of expression, which are separate from us. I found this to be interesting since this applies to most aspects of life. There are always multiple ways to interpret something, tell a story, or view a situation. It ultimately lies upon the way the story is told, which will then largely determine how we will interpret it.

The last point that I found fascinating is that stories have the power to take us to a place where things happen, but in reality, they do not. Stories offer us a choice between believed spoken words, or a visual world. A real-world example that I thought of when reading this was the way we describe ‘Canadian Land’, and what it means to be Canadian. I thought of the Molson Beer commercial I am Canadian. When thinking of this, I thought of the colonization of land and how the story of what it means to be Canadian is told, and whether the audience chooses to believe the words they see or the world they live in. The choice between the reality that we live on stolen land, or the story that being Canadian is exactly what this commercial says it is.

I hope you enjoyed reading my perspective and I look forward to reading the comments! 

Thanks,

Maya 🙂

Works Cited:

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. AA. Knopf. Toronto. 2003. Print.

Chamberlin, Edward. “Interview with J. Edward Chamberlin”. Writer’s Café.  Web April 04 2013.

Courtney MacNeil, “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/

1. Am. Canadian! By Molson – CBC Archives. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/i-am-canadian-by-molson

Hi everyone! I am really looking forward to reading all of your blog posts this semester, and being able to comment and communicate with you all! I work full-time at Vancity Credit Union, so all of my classes are online. I am a fourth-year student and am majoring in Psychology, and plan to graduate in May 2021 after completing five years at UBC. I was born and raised in Vancouver, so this truly is home for me. My favourite areas of study are the neuroscience of motivation, the study of childhood and aging, and personality development. This past semester I studied abroad in Paris, and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. While in Paris, one of my favourite courses I took was a smart and popular culture course, which focused on decolonization and feminist movements across Europe and America. I had never traveled to Europe before, and the culture shock was quite extreme. I took courses in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century European history and French language courses. 

In English 372, I am excited to review and learn more about Canadian literature and analyze the intersections between European and Indigenous traditions of literature. This course offers a much larger scope of information I have not been exposed to, which makes me extremely eager to learn. In my first year at UBC, I took GRSJ 224. Throughout this course, my favourite topic we learned about was the male gaze. My professor was able to relate the male gaze to so many different commercials, movies, and societal views. I also learned about the nation-state, and the struggle the Indigenous peoples are facing against the Canadians, which includes the destruction of their land and the extraction of oil (which is also destroying the land). In the GRSJ course, I also reviewed many different terms, and one was ‘White Privilege’, which is an invisible backpack of unearned basic assets that provide White people with the comfort they do not realize they are lucky to have. This was a term that was eye-opening as I felt it could be broadened as a first-world privilege backpack as well – being born in a first world country with free clean water, a roof over your head, and a bed to sleep in.

I am looking forward to participating in this online course. I have taken many online courses before in different areas such as Psychology and ADHE, and I enjoyed how each professor made the course interactive in different ways. The ADHE course I took used the UBC blogs as a platform and I found it to be a really good way to get the students interacting with each other in a comfortable atmosphere, and an easy way to share my thoughts. My favourite online Psychology class was the one I took last summer on research methods, and our final project was a video of ourselves reporting our hypothetical experiment we would conduct, outlining the introductions, methods, findings and discussion areas. I found this to be extremely interesting and engaging as a student! I am most excited for the group research paper, which will allow me to collaborate my ideas with other peers in this class.

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to read my blog and learn a bit more about me! I am looking forward to getting started with the course and reading all of your blog posts.

Works Cited:

The Local fr. “The French Culture Shocks You Should Be Prepared For.” The Local, 22 Jan. 2018, www.thelocal.fr/20180122/french-culture-shocks-that-no-one-tells-you-about.

Loreck, Janice, and School of Media. “Explainer: What Does the ‘Male Gaze’ Mean, and What about a Female Gaze?” The Conversation, 21 Oct. 2019, theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaze-52486.

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